suggestion for ACD syntax

[Peter Rice]

Guy Bottu wrote:

> 	Dear developpers,
> 
> Yesterday I had a discussion with Marc Colet, developper of the EMBOSS 
> interface wEMBOSS and we have a suggestion for a small extension of the 
> ACD syntax. It would be nice if the parameter type "infile" had an 
> attribute "extension", so that the program would only accept input files 
> with a name ending with ... This would perhaps not be so useful at the 
> command line, but in a GUI this would allow for a selector with a filter 
> showing only the appropriate files.

Good suggestion. We have this already for "directory".

However ... there could be problems (as JR Valverde has pointed out) with 
systems that use different extensions for specific file formats.

We have another way to do this ....

We are adding "knowntype" definitions for infile, outfile and other ACD types. 
The "acdvalid" utility now warns if the knowntype is missing, or is not 
defined in the file knowntypes.standard.

Interfaces could convert these knowntype values (and sequence types for the 
sequence inputs) into a standard set of extensions to filter.

This would not need any change to ACD, but would need some agreement on the 
knowntype attribute values.

Hope this helps,

Peter